When Tradition and Taunts Collide: Gay Hockey Fans Criticize Garden

During the final 10 minutes of many Rangers home games, the spotlights focus on Section 407 as Larry Goodman, a longtime season-ticket holder, pumps up the crowd with a goofy dance.

As Goodman’s routine is broadcast on the giant monitors above the ice, a familiar chant picks up momentum. “Ho-mo Lar-ry!” the crowd shouts. “Ho-mo Lar-ry!”

The chant is one example of what several gay hockey fans describe as a toxic atmosphere during Rangers games and that Madison Square Garden, which owns the team, is not doing nearly enough to address their concerns.

Kevin Jennings, a Rangers fan who is gay, said he stopped attending home games for about a month this season because he felt so uncomfortable with the homophobic epithets that are shouted to the players.

“This is a place where I grew up, and I never really felt uncomfortable at the Garden,” Stankes said. “I didn’t wear it on my sleeve that I’m gay. If I take a friend who is also gay who, for lack of a better term, is not as masculine, I’m always sitting there a little tense. Like, is somebody going to say something to us? And it’s made it not quite as fun as it used to be.”

Other fans recalled that the crowd booed when the name of the New York City Gay Hockey Association, a recreational league, flashed briefly across the jumbo screen.

“It’s a pervasive problem,” said Jennings, who is the executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a nonprofit group that promotes tolerance of gays and lesbians. “I took my godson a few months ago. I won’t take him again. He’s 6. I don’t want him looking around and seeing other men engaging in this behavior and thinking this is the way you behave.”

Jennings and Jeff Kagan, the director of the gay hockey league, wrote to Rangers General Manager Glen Sather in November and asked him to create a fan-education program that denounces antigay remarks.

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who is gay, joined them in January and in her letter urged the Rangers to take “swift action to educate their fans about the importance of tolerance and diversity — qualities that have made this city great.”

Since then, the Rangers have broadcast warnings that they will remove fans who behave offensively and said they have posted additional security throughout the arena.

Barry Watkins, a spokesman for Madison Square Garden, said in a statement that while the majority of Rangers fans behave respectfully at games, “homophobic or racially or culturally insensitive behavior is unacceptable at any event at Madison Square Garden, and we have taken aggressive steps to deal with the offensive behavior of a very small minority of game attendees.”

Several people who violated the Garden’s policy against using offensive language have been ejected from the arena, and more have been given written and verbal warnings, he said, adding that some of those ejections were for antigay remarks.

The Rangers turned down Jennings’s offer to help M.S.G. create a public-service announcement urging fans to be more respectful. Jennings’s group has produced similar announcements for MTV and other outlets.

John Rosasco, the vice president for public relations for the Rangers, wrote Jennings that the team limited its public-service announcements to those that promoted its charity, the Garden of Dreams Foundation. “The P.S.A.’s we produce are centered on those initiatives,” Rosasco wrote.

Several spectators interviewed at a Rangers home game Tuesday spoke proudly of the fans’ high-intensity devotion to their team. Some fans noted with pride that brawls break out in the stands nearly as often as they do on the ice.

Rangers fans still shout a derisive chant about Denis Potvin at home games, a reference that dates to 1979, when the Islanders’ Potvin hit the Rangers’ Ulf Nilsson and broke Nilsson’s ankle. The chant was always shouted after the organist played the song “Let’s Go Band.” But in the 1980s, in an attempt to crack down on the chant, the Rangers stopped playing the song. More than 20 years later, fans still whistle the song as a lead-in to the chant.

“It’s a hockey game,” said Ricardo Pereira, 25, a season-ticket holder from Huntington on Long Island. “Hockey players are tough. Deal with it.”

Hockey has a loyal fan base within New York’s gay community, including the members of the New York Gay Hockey Association, which oversees 5 teams and claims 150 members. Many gay Rangers fans grew up attending games with their families and say they make a distinction between raucous tradition and comments that single out a specific group.

Stankes said he turned down an invitation by the gay hockey group to attend a Rangers game en masse a few years ago. As he feared, the crowd booed when the name of the group flashed on the monitors. But Kagan said the fans’ reaction surprised and hurt him. “I never expected that at all,” he said.

One of the most visible examples of the fans’ antigay behavior is the chant directed at Goodman, which according to him began in 1998 or 1999, when the Rangers were doing poorly and some fans claimed Goodman’s dancing was jinxing the team.

“The fans were looking to vent their frustration on somebody and unfortunately it was me,” said Goodman, 38, who lives in northern New Jersey and said he was not gay. Goodman is a celebrity at Rangers games and appears frequently on television and in local newspapers, but was reluctant to comment on the chants and told a reporter he prefers to be called Dancin’ Larry.

He said lately that he did not get invited to dance as often as he used to. “They’ve been trying to crack down on it,” Goodman said of the chanting. A Madison Square Garden official noted that some fans chanted only “Go Home, Larry,” and said the organization was evaluating whether to continue including Goodman in the game routine. Although he is hugely popular with fans, the team official acknowledged his dancing invited derogatory remarks.

Goodman said he had learned to live with chants. “That’s how it will always be and that’s what makes it part of the fun in going to a Rangers game in New York City, for God’s sake,” Goodman said.

“It comes to a certain point, it is sort of like, you’ve got to have freedom of speech.”

Because Madison Square Garden is privately owned, several free-speech lawyers said that First Amendment rights do not apply within the arena.

This is not the first time gay and lesbian groups have confronted Madison Square Garden. In 2002, two lesbian fans at a Liberty W.N.B.A. game said a security guard asked them not to display a sign reading “Lesbians for Liberty,” according to news reports. Lesbian fans criticized the Garden for not acknowledging that lesbians represented a large part of the Liberty’s fan base, and staged a “kiss-in” at a home game, drawing national news coverage.

Not all gay hockey fans say they are troubled by fan behavior. Stankes said he had learned to take much of the shouting with a “grain of salt.”

Chris Brand, an Islanders fan who says he is gay and occasionally attends Ranger games, said he thought few people who use derogatory remarks were actually antigay.

“It’s sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Brand said. “People are riled up. I don’t think people have thought about it too much.”

But Quinn, the City Council speaker, said even if some gay hockey fans were not bothered by the comments, the Rangers needed to take a more aggressive role in setting an inclusive tone. She said the public announcements and extra security guards represented progress but did not go far enough.

Quinn said she planned to invite Garden management to meet with her, Kagan and Jennings to push for more remedies.

“I’d like to see more,” Quinn said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Ranger Games, a Clash Of Tradition and Gay Slurs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe